The Afterlife of Skylitzes Matritensis in 16th-century Italy

The eight manuscripts of the Chronicle of Skylitzes that derive from the Skylitzes Matritensis (SM) manuscript—easily identifiable by gaps in the text—were copied in Italy during the 16th century. None of the apographs went beyond transcribing the Chronicle and its paratexts (the miniature captions and marginal poems). A copy of the miniatures could hardly have been produced in Messina—at least, no illustrated Greek manuscripts from the 15th–16th centuries are known from there—but it was a plausible undertaking in Venice or Rome, where copies of SM arrived and where we know illustrated Greek manuscripts were copied, such as the Escorial Σ.I.7 containing the works of Ioannes Mauropous, in 1564. Although Cardinal Bessarion’s patronage revitalized Greek culture at the Monastery of San Salvatore in Messina from the mid-15th century onward, Bessarion neither commissioned a copy of SM nor ever owned a copy of the Chronicle. Konstantinos Laskaris transcribed a selection of passages from SM in Matrit. 4621, but it was not until 1534 that the first full copy of SM was made in Vat. Ottob. gr. 340, by a monk of San Salvatore, Ioakeim Mboutas. He transcribed the captions from the original as if they were subtitles and added a cross in the margin to indicate the presence of a miniature. Matrit. 4594 and Par. suppl. gr. 305 were also copied in Messina, but the remaining copies are Roman and appear to reflect the curia’s interest in Byzantine history during a time of conciliar debate about the organization of the Christian Church. It was to a cardinal, Marco Antonio da Mula, that Giovan Battista Gabio dedicated his Latin translation of the Chronicle (Venice, 1570), made from a copy of SM supplemented with a Vatican codex.